Collecting Payments Online
Connecting Stripe and taking card payments on invoices.
With Stripe connected, every invoice you send carries a pay button and clients settle it by card. Without it, they get your payment instructions instead.
Connecting Stripe
In Settings, on the payments tab, start the connection and Stripe takes over — you create or sign into a Stripe account and give them your business details and the bank account for payouts.
Back in CeremonySync, the card shows three checks: Onboarding, Charges and Payouts. All three must be enabled before anyone can pay by card.
Have ready before you start: your legal business name and tax ID, your business address, and the routing and account numbers for payouts. It's Stripe's form, not ours — we never see or store any of it.
What it costs: a 1% platform fee on top of Stripe's own processing fees. The account is yours rather than a sub-account of ours, payouts go from Stripe straight to your bank on their normal schedule — usually two business days — and the charge on your client's statement shows your venue name.
How a payment happens
The client opens their invoice link, enters the PIN from their email, and clicks the pay button. Stripe's checkout takes the card; the invoice updates itself when the payment succeeds.
A payment covering the balance moves the invoice to Paid. A smaller one — a single installment of a payment plan, say — moves it to Partially Paid. Either way it lands in the payment history with its method and date.
Who pays the processing fees
Pass Processing Fees to Client in the invoice builder adds the fee to their total. Leave it off and your venue absorbs it.
Taking payment without Stripe
Two options, and they work together.
Fill in How to Pay on the invoice — who to make the check out to and where to send it, or your bank details for a transfer. This box only appears when Stripe isn't connected, because a client should never be offered both at once.
Then record the payment when it arrives.
How to Pay is per invoice, not venue-wide. If you take checks on every booking, you'll be typing it each time — worth saving as a snippet somewhere.
Leave it blank and the invoice still goes out; it just asks the client to contact you, with your venue email as a link. That works, at the cost of answering the same question repeatedly.
Sharing the payment link
Three routes: the email sent by Generate & Send, the copy button on any invoice row, and the couple's Planning Hub if invoices are switched on there.
All of them land on the same PIN-protected page.
Cancelled and voided
A cancelled invoice shows a notice and hides the pay button. A voided one can't be paid at all, and voiding is permanent — it lives in the Danger Zone for that reason.
Tip: Before sending anything real, make a small draft invoice and open its public link yourself. You'll see exactly what a client sees, PIN and all, and you'll catch a missing logo or a wrong payment instruction while it still costs nothing.
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